FinTech Friday | Holiday Tips and Scams To Look Out For During The Holiday Season | B2B Vault: The Payment Technology Podcast

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin, live from B2B Vault, the payment technology podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by the Henry Ford of merchant services, Allen Kopelman. And today is FinTech Friday.

Yay!

And we'll be providing you educational information about business, fintech, small business, payment processing, and the process— and the business— and the— geez— and the technology businesses are using in the world today.

You know, I added in the, you know, the whatever, trying to be cool.

I messed up the whole intro. Whatever, it was good. Uh, yeah, man, so, uh, today's FinTech Friday. Um, finishing up a long week, a lot of stuff going on in the office. Uh, Nationwide Payment System has a new social media expert. Her name is Camille. She's off to a great start, so we're, uh, very happy that she's here.

Excited to have another team member.

Yes, very busy. Yeah, it's good. It's good. Help out with all the social media stuff. Something that we've been lacking. So hopefully you guys will start to engage into the content a little bit more. And we're excited about that. So thank you, Camille, for joining the team. And what else we got going?

So today we wanted to talk about holiday tips and some of the phone calls we've been getting from, uh, clients who need help during the holidays.

There is a lot of stuff going on in regards to the holidays.

Yes.

Um, lots of fraud, lots of, uh, scammy spammy stuff, links being passed around.

Yeah, like phishing is like fishing all-time high right now. Yeah, people really need to get educated so they don't fall for these phishing scams, which used to be limited to, you know, email, right? And now it's spilled over to text messages.

Yeah, the text message— they got, they got smart.

Yeah, they started getting in on the text messaging. And I mean, um, somebody— we had somebody get a text message the other day saying something was wrong with their merchant account to go log in. I was like, whoa, we don't send out text messages telling you to log into your merchant account.

Yeah, no, that's interesting.

And then we saw the whole thing going on with Zelle, right?

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden, after, you know—

well, what's going on with Zelle for those that—

so what's going on with Zelle is, is Zelle has been on the hot seat with Congress for I guess the past couple of months. And, you know, as to people that fell for scams or got scammed or sent money to people they shouldn't have sent money to. And really, like, when you send money— when you— who wants to win the World Cup? I don't know, we don't discuss the world. Not—

we're not big football fans over here, Chris.

I don't even know who's in the World Cup. Christian, tell us who's in the World Cup.

Yeah.

So the, uh, so, so that— so, so a lot of people fell for these scams and sent money to people that they shouldn't have sent money to. And Bank of America had— there was a big scam with them where people were told to Zelle their mortgage payment to the Bank of America. Turned out to be a huge scam. And now all of a sudden, you know, Zelle put in two-factor authentication when you add a new person. To your Zelle, although I feel like that's too late, you know, and I don't know what they can do about it because they're saying once the money's gone, the money's gone. And then they sent out— I got it from my bank, Justin, you said you got the same thing from your bank— there's a whole list of prohibited transaction types and then a whole instructions that was like almost 2 pages, right?

Well, I don't about what had the same— I think— I don't know, mine wasn't as thorough as yours was.

Yeah, mine was like— they had lists in there, do not send money for this, that, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, that it's a violation of the— of Zelle. And there was a whole thing in there, and I guess that's just putting everybody on, on warning, like, like, okay, we covered these losses right, you know, because came out that, uh, well, it came out that Chase— I think it was Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo were the ones that had the most.

Oh yeah, those three were— yeah, those two, and then basically Wells Fargo.

Yeah. And then they finally came out and said that they were gonna— they were gonna re-look at all the ones that they didn't give money to, and then they were going to look into that. That. So now I'm guessing everybody changed the rules because you got it, I got it, pretty much almost the same.

I'm sure everyone got it.

So everybody probably got that.

Yeah, you know, check your notification inside of your banking app. I'm sure there's a little— a message in there for you, you know.

And then the other thing that's been, been in the news a lot is this Buy Now Pay Later, and they're on the hot seat Obviously, right, they're on the hot seat, and we'll discuss that in a minute because the hot seat covers quite a few companies because it covers the financial industry in general. Okay, so here I get a letter from Chase and it says, hey, we want you to know about a change in your agreement. It says now you have access to pay for purchases, um, over $100 and break them into equal monthly payments with no interest, just a fixed monthly fee. No credit check or application required. And I got one of these on my business account and on my, uh, personal account. So they're fighting back. The banks are going to fight back. The, you know, the banks and their credit cards.

We've been talking about that for a while, like, what are they— banks going to do to do this, right?

So now they're fighting back on the buy now pay later and And that's actually a better deal for, A, the merchants, right? Because now you don't have, you don't have a third-party company, right? And B, better for the cardholders because now they're dealing with their bank and not a third, not a third party. And, you know, so let's talk about why everybody's on the hot seat. Everybody's on the hot seat because they decided to put a bill out, and the bill is basically require the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, to issue guidelines on digital assets and for other purposes, which encompasses fintech companies. So a lot of this, you know, was spurred on by the FTX scandal. Yeah. And all the missing money. And this goes into a whole bunch of stuff about digital assets. This thing is covering digital assets at kiosks. They're also talking about in here, which is interesting, how they refer to all this. So they refer to kiosks that are buying and selling and exchanging virtual currencies. They talk about asset mixer, which I don't even know which means— a website or software designed to conceal or obstruct the origin, destination of digital transactions. Yeah, wallets, but they don't put— call it that. Yeah, but they're referring to a wallet.

So that's messed up.

Yeah, well, they're making a rule that they can't disguise what they're doing, and financial institution is a term, and they're talking about that now. They're talking about that they want financial institutions, which we've seen quite a few of them say they're doing something with crypto and they're saying that they want financial institutions to get involved in this. Now, I don't know how that's going to work. Then they talk about a word— that's something called a privacy coin, which I'm not sure what that is. And then they're saying that these companies all need to have a money service business license. So that includes custodial and unhosted wallet providers. Cryptocurrency miners, validators, and other nodes who act to validate or secure third-party transactions, independent network participants including— I don't know what an MEV searcher is— and other validators with control over network protocols. So that's going to encompass quite a bit of companies who need to become an MSB.

It sounds like every company.

Yeah, that's what I mean. That's encompassing everybody along the value chain. It's crazy. So that's pretty crazy. And then they want this in act— they want all this in place in 120 days. So that's basically 4 months. Then they said they want record— that they want everybody. So then I guess— I don't know what they're going to do with, with these companies who are not 20 days in, in, in the government is like, I don't know, it's a little crazy, like a year. And then reporting requirements, they're going to have reporting requirements. And reporting of transactions greater than $10,000 and assets, one or more accounts if anybody— and they want them to report if people have accounts outside of the United States of America.

That sounds like a lot, man. And if you want to find out any more about the bill, where should they go?

Well, we can put a link in the, uh, podcast notes. Sure. But it goes into a— it goes into like all kinds of agencies, the DEA, this and that. And, you know, but they also have a whole nother bill about fintech which encompasses the truth in lending laws and all this stuff involving all these fintech companies who are providing buy now pay later and other financing things. But now let's get into holiday tips because we get calls from clients all the time and They go, oh, what do we do if this happens or that happens? So let's talk about what some of those things are. So we got a call from, you know, one client with a website, and somebody ordered like 50 of an item. So they were like, what do we do? So I'm like, you know, you have to validate the transaction. So have you dealt with the cut— you know, I tell them basic things like they should know. Have you dealt with the customer before?

Right.

No was the answer. You know, Google the address where they want it delivered.

It wasn't there.

No, the address turned out to be for this one a freight forwarder office. Oh, that's like the biggest— that means wherever, whatever you're shipping there is probably going to be out of the United States hours after it gets there. And so, and I said, well, call the phone number. And they called the phone number, the person never called back, so they voided the transaction.

Smart.

And then they were basically done with it.

And, and what he's— what he's saying is he's— he's— what you really— what you're really wanting to do right now is monitor your online transactions or at your store, right? Like, you just— I know it's busy and it's tough, right?

Yeah.

But at this, you gotta do your due diligence, otherwise you're just going to be throwing your merchandise and money out the window, and you should have been, you know, donated to Toys for Tots or something. I don't know.

Uh, but so yeah, man, the same thing if someone comes in your store and let's say they want to buy, you know, 20, 20 pairs of shoes, right? Okay, well, how many times does that happen throughout the year that someone's going to come in and buy 20 pairs of shoes? Not often, right? Not often. So you want to make sure, like, okay, does the driver, you know, ask for ID? You know, you go into a lot of businesses, I tell people, they go, oh, no one asks for ID. I'm like, yeah, go try to buy some electronics, you know, you want a ticket item regardless of what it is, right?

I mean, even at a restaurant, if you got like a bill for $500, I've— someone I've seen, they've asked me for my ID. Yeah, I mean, I probably don't look like the most up-and-up feller, but no, but I'm just— I'm not out here scamming, but I get it.

But I'm just saying, you go to and make— but I'm just trying to say, like, major retailers do it. You know, you go into Best Buy and you're buying a laptop, you're giving them their credit card, they ask for your driver's license.

Oh, for sure.

That's what I'm trying to say. So even if you have a small business, don't feel like—

oh, because if it's not signed, there's— they're supposed to ask you, right? The back of the credit card. Yeah, there's like, by law.

Yeah, if it's not signed, they're supposed to ask you for—

I mean, that doesn't happen.

I never signed mine.

I don't sign mine either.

Yeah, so, but they're supposed— you're allowed to ask, but I'm just saying. So, but people will tell me, oh, I feel uncomfortable. Don't feel uncomfortable. You're going to feel really uncomfortable if somebody rips you off.

Yeah, uncomfortable is not even the word. You're going to feel violated, right?

That's what I mean. Like, you can live through a few minutes of uncomfort, you know. Yeah, of doing that. So, you know, and things can happen in person too, like People will come in, they'll have a damaged EMV chip because they're a scammer, and they run it in your machine, then they say it doesn't work, then they try to convince the employee to key enter it. And a lot of people have, um, you know, seasonal employees, so you got to make sure that even your new employees, that they're trained like, oh, the chip doesn't work, we don't take that card. You know, the— you don't— you're not going to swipe it, you're not keying it in, you're not doing any of that.

Yeah, the seasonal employees I've been to many stores in the past couple of weeks and you could tell that they're all brand new, right? Right. Like, we were at the grocery store, for instance, and there's a huge influx of people at the grocery store because no one's from here. Everyone is from out of town and they're buying everything off of the shelves. And these— it, it's, it kind of sucks because these people, they don't really know what they're doing, right? And so the time that you're in the store now is going from 15 minutes to almost an hour, right? And you know, the training— you— these people need training. Like, they're— every time I'm sitting there, like, they don't know how to do this, they can't void this, or, you know, they need to take— come on. It's tough, but you got to do it.

Yeah, but you just got to make sure, you know, especially when you're a small business owner, you want to make sure that, you know, you're not getting ripped off. Well, sure. And I've been reading all these articles about, you know, friendly fraud is on the rise.

What's friendly fraud?

So friendly fraud is someone actually was there, they did their transaction, and then they decided whatever, they didn't like it. A month later, a week later, or they're going to pay for it. Yeah, they just do a chargeback, and they do the chargeback because there's a lot of merchants, businesses that don't respond to the chargebacks, right? So if you don't respond, you lose your money. And so some people are just testing the water to see if you're going to respond, you know, and then you respond and you win. But if you don't respond, you lose. I mean, they never—

you snooze, you lose.

Yeah, you snooze, you lose. But the friendly fraud is, is is now— it used to be where it was like all, um, online, and now it's spreading to like in-person because a lot of businesses have like pay by QR code and it's a non-card-present transaction. Or they have, um— I'll give you another example of some crazy friendly fraud. So we had a client and they— they—

crazy friendly fraud.

Yeah, crazy. That people go to their website. They didn't want to listen to me when I said do not install like Apple Pay, where you go to Apple Pay directly.

Okay.

Or Google Pay. Do not do that. It operates in the gateway. People can—

so that they have the option to use that, right?

There's a— you can already use it on any, any, any gateway, any purchase you're making. You can always— if you're on your phone, you can use your Apple Pay, for the most part, right? But this guy went and signed up directly with them.

So then what you're saying is that he used— he, he got a merchant account through Apple Pay and installed that right into his website.

And then they ended up with, in 2 months, over $5,000 to chargebacks. And then they found out that it's impossible to them.

Why?

Because apparently Apple doesn't really have a system to deal with that.

And what's Apple's system to deal with it though?

They don't really have— I didn't—

so you just lose your money? And that's what is Apple's response?

None. Like, they couldn't— there was no customer service, no nothing. So they took it off the website and they did what I told them to do, activate the Apple Pay, set it up so you could do Apple Pay and Google Pay just by putting this in.

I mean, what kind of website is it? Big website?

Yeah, big website selling all kinds of, you know, goods, clothing and except clothing and accessories website.

It's not a WordPress website?

Um, yeah, it's WordPress, but they put the— they installed the extra pay buttons. You can install like—

is this person doing this in themselves?

Um, they have a development team. It's a pretty big company.

I'm not gonna—

I don't know. Listen, I don't— when, when merchants tell me they're gonna do things, I give them my advice.

You should be like, hey, you should talk to my developer. He's been, you know, he's been doing WordPress.

Yeah, but they're not talking over a decade. Yeah, I know, but they're not talking to me. When they're talking to me, they're saying, oh, we're going to put Apple Pay, and I tell them, you don't need to do that.

Well, you don't need to do that.

No, right. That's what I tried to explain to them, and they thought it's going to be better. But they found out that it's worse, and we were—

I would just turn it off. I wouldn't even accept Apple Pay if that's the case. Like, I wouldn't even accept it.

Yeah, but it works differently when it comes through the merchant account. So when it's coming through the merchant account, it's validated, right?

Yeah, never mind.

Yeah, right. So it's validated differently.

Now you could pay whatever with any card that you want to pay with, right?

But we're validating it differently.

Yeah, I get it.

They are. And if you have a problem, guess what? We can get in there. Someone tries to do a chargeback, no problem, we go and we fight the chargeback. With them, there's no way, there's no mechanism to deal with it.

Understood.

So they found that out the hard way and they turned it off. I was happy because all of a sudden the volume doubled.

My mama always said a hard head makes a soft ass.

Well, I try to tell people, when you give— when you put in these other payment options onto your website— we had another client and and they had pay with this something— there's some new PayPal wallet thing. Yeah, right, pay with PayPal.

PayPal Payments.

And then they ended up with a bunch of chargebacks that, that were like $300, $400 a piece.

PayPal?

Yeah, through PayPal.

PayPal is pretty bad with that too.

And then they tried to fight them, and then PayPal did not help them, and they ended up losing the chargebacks. They took that—

the only, the The only way PayPal— you win with PayPal is if you— I'm gonna— this is word of advice for everybody that's, you know, that anyone that I've known who's actually won against PayPal from the merchant side was that they took physical photos of the merchandise in the package and at the shipping place. And that is the only way that they ever prove were able to prove that they actually shipped, like, and then they had the receipt, you know, of the shipping receipt that they—

well, they got them messed up because the shipping was done and sent to like a UPS store, and because it's inside PayPal, they just see the approval. They did not go look at like the other parts of the transaction to see like, oh, maybe that's not a good address, right? And you got to be really careful with shipping addresses that you're not shipping to freight forwarders office suites that you don't know. You know, I tell customers all the time, like, we have this cigar guy and they got smart and they developed a whitelist and a blacklist. So they have a whitelist and a blacklist. So now if somebody tries to scam them—

oh yeah, yeah, we were talking about that—

you know, they blacklist them. If it— and then if they know the customer, it's whitelist. But also they check, you know, like somebody's— that somebody the other day order like a bunch of orders cigar, a bunch of orders, and they had them shipped to different addresses, right? They just called the guy on the phone, they verified it, the guy told them who— you know, they spoke to the guy.

Oh yes, for the, uh, bachelor party, or what was it for?

No, it was the guy giving corporate gifts.

I thought you said something else though.

No, this was another one, corporate gifts.

So the other guy was giving away some for a birthday party or a birthday party?

Yeah, and they were shipping stuff stuff for the birth people that do different addresses, the different addresses. Yeah, so they called up and the guy said, oh no, that's me, blah blah blah. And they said, oh, send a picture of your credit card to us and your driver's license. And the guy did. It was completely legitimate.

So that's an example of doing your due diligence to make sure you're not getting yourself robbed, right?

Because otherwise, you know, we had another guy and they sell like toners for your compu— for, you know, your printer. And somebody ordered like $1,000 worth of toners The guy called up, no one answered the phone. They checked the address, it was a UPS store, so they voided the transaction. I mean, you know, I had another guy that made me a bet, and I said, I said, I don't want to bet you any money, you know, because I said, I'll bet $100, I'll bet $100 that I'm right. And they were like, no, you're preventing us from doing sales. I'm like, do whatever you want, but I guarantee you that thing's going to become a chargeback. And this person is a scammer. So what did— what happened? This person ordered like 2 pairs of shoes off of their website. They sent it out and it— and nothing happened. Then the guy, the same person, ordered a whole bunch of more, like $700, $800 worth of shoes. And this is a like a, a place that buys like closeouts of shoes. So the shoe— the shoes are— and sneakers are like $20, $30, $40 at the most, right? So it was a lot of shoes for $700 and something, right? They send it out, literally 2 days later, ba-bam, chargeback, fraud. And the guy told me, he goes, oh, you want to— want me to mail you $100? I'm like, no, I don't want your money. So I'm trying to teach you like that this is not what—

listen to this guy, he knows what he's talking about. Real quick before we keep going, thank you to all the listeners who tune in on Fridays. Please subscribe to the channel on YouTube, turn on the notifications so you'll never miss another episode. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, every Friday at 3 PM, we try to get the podcast on Mondays and Wednesdays around at the latest by 5. So yeah, follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn @B2BVault, the Payment Technology Podcast. You can catch us on every digital streaming provider known to man. If there is not one that you know about, and you use and we're not on there, let us know and I will get us submitted to that place immediately. Expeditiously. Also, any big news? We're going to talk about none else really, right?

No, no, it's a No, I was gonna say something else.

But yeah, no, the holidays are coming up. So we're still talking about the holidays. And if you want to talk to this guy, text the word book to 954-827-9818. And he'll get back to you as soon as possible. As your question, hit us up on the LinkedIn profile, answer your questions, community page on Facebook. You know, we're trying to get engaged. Uh, with engagement with our fan base. So any, any little bit helps. Any, uh, tips, tricks, or anything that we're missing or doing wrong, please let us know. There's flies flying around the office this afternoon. It's a little, it's a little muggy, raining, a little muggy in South Florida.

This had a little rain this morning.

Yeah, a lot of rain, a lot of rain yesterday and this morning for sure. But, uh, yeah, man, thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to, uh some more podcasts.

Yeah, so here's one for that you need to watch out for. This is the, this is the one that hurts me, and you have to really watch out for this one. If the— when someone comes to pay and they put their chip in and then the chip doesn't work and they try it a bunch of times, just tell them, say, you got to give us another credit card. Do not key enter that card. Don't swipe the card. Don't do anything because today most people, they're either dipping their chip. It's kind of funny. Dip the chip.

I'm dipping my chip.

Yeah, they either dip the chip or they're doing a tap and pay or they're doing a wallet payment. You know, that's, that's pretty much like what— and if all you mean, you know, yeah, like they're using their phone and they're doing, they're turning on their Apple Pay and no one can, you know, when somebody says, oh, you know, there's no way I paid with my Apple Pay or Google Pay, I start laughing because First of all, you gotta like do your phone to your face thing or put in your code just to get your phone open. Then you got to go to the app, you gotta click, click it like a few times before, and they make you put it up to your face or put a code in, right? So you can use it.

You can't do that, like you can't just— if, if none of that was done, you can't just scan your phone, right? You can't just wave the phone around without the screen, and it's like the screen's locked and It's not gonna work. Like, that's— they're lying to you. Everyone stop believing that.

Like, somebody did a chargeback the other day and they go, oh, I walked by the machine and it must have like made my phone go off. I'm like, no, it doesn't work like that. And they know how Apple Pay works, the credit card processor. So I was like, how can they even believe that the person said that?

And they sent the chargeback anyway?

Yeah.

Oh my God.

And that was the reason. And I was reading it and I was laughing. I was like, that's impossible to do. The person who got the chargeback doesn't have Apple Pay, so they didn't know how it worked. But you got to watch out for that because that's one of the biggest scams. They wait till you're really busy and then, oh, my card doesn't work, I'll key it in, and then it's a fraudulent card. Like I was telling Justin, I watched this movie called— it's on Netflix— Emily the Criminal, and that's what it was all about. Now this movie's a little dated because they were swiping the card These guys were making fake credit cards and then they were hitting electronic stores buying big screen TVs. It just came out, it's called Emily the Criminal.

I think I've seen it.

Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. I think I watched it, I'm pretty sure it was. Yeah, well, that's a crazy—

it sounds very familiar what you're talking about.

It's a really crazy movie.

I don't know, I was watching this Vice episode of the— did you ever watch the Vice episode with, uh, when they— but the guys who create the credit cards, who like got the machine.

Yeah, that's what they were doing too.

Yeah, this movie I'm talking about in real life though. Oh yeah, on Vice, you know, the Vice News. Yeah, yeah, they go to guys got all masks. It was in Atlanta actually.

I believe it. No, they— that's what they were doing. They were— they had stolen credit card numbers and they had one of those machines and they were making the credit card Who played Omar in— um, oh, I forget.

Michael— rest in peace to that guy too. He passed away.

Oh, he just passed away? The guy played Omar in The Wire? The Wire. Yeah, Omar in The Wire.

Hello everyone, we'd like to take this time to thank our sponsors Nationwide Payment Systems and NPS Printer. We'd also like to shout out the listeners and everyone that subscribed to our YouTube channel. Thank you for tuning in. If you'd like to reach Allen or myself, head over to B2BVault.info where you'll find two forms, one to contact us and another if you're interested in becoming a sponsor. If you'd like to sign up for a merchant account, click the Apply Now button located at the top of the page of B2BVault.info where you'll answer a few questions and you'll be on your way to processing payments in no time. The podcast is available on Spotify, iTunes, Pandora, and other popular streaming networks. Thanks again for listening. I can't believe I—

there's a movie, Cedar Rapids, where— that's really crazy. And then some guy does an impression of Omar.

Michael K. Williams. I was— I knew his name was Michael. I couldn't— yeah, Michael K. Williams, rest in peace, Michael K.

And then we were also having a discussion earlier about what is— is that— because that we were— I was listening to the news and these guys were discussing, is Die Hard really a Christmas movie?

Yeah, absolutely. There's absolutely— Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Anyone who tells you differently doesn't know what Christmas movies are. I enlightened, uh, Allen Kopelman this morning that Rambo, the very first one, is also a Christmas movie. If you do not believe me, Go to the opening scenes and you will understand what I'm saying.

Yes, I remember that. Yep.

Um, it's Christmas music through the whole beginning of that movie, literally. So yeah, what's another one that people say is not a Christmas movie but it is?

I was just very—

ah, anyway, there's Home Alone. Home— obviously that's a Christmas movie. And then I'm Gonna Get You, Sucker. That's a Christmas movie. I don't— check it out for yourself. It's hilarious. Do you remember that movie? I'm Gonna Get You Sucka.

Yes, I'm gonna get you.

Prosthetic leg popped off, her hair came off. That was insane. Sorry.

So, so, you know, the holiday time is, you know, a time where every business should be making ton— making, making your sales. Many in retail in the month of December, they do— they make more money in December than they do their whole year. And the fraudsters are out, so you got to be careful. Be careful on your website orders, be careful when you take orders over the phone.

Yeah, we didn't really— we forgot to express the importance of like updating the website during this time. You have to update your website. Like if you're running an e-commerce shop, and you're selling stuff, just trust me, you don't want the site to go down while, you know, in the midst of all this, right? And then it's a catastrophe, you're gonna want to, you know, create a backup of your website, you know, test it, make sure that everything that's, you know, that if it, if it does need updates, make sure it's working with the site that you're supposed to do, you know, to update and just be careful, you know, be mindful of that. You got to be careful. And, you know, people are trying to break into people's websites every day. Like, my— one of the nationwide payments hacked into people's websites every day. Nationwide payment systems is constantly under pressure, constantly, all the time. Like, people trying to get Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of information on this site, right?

Right.

So, you know, there's no sensitive information. So no good, no sensitive, right. But there is a lot of information, right? People there could get some phone numbers if they would, but it's not happening, not under my watch. But yeah, I would just suggest that, you know, I'm a WordPress developer. So I make sure that my sites are updated because I know the, you know, yeah, it's not good if something goes wrong.

You got to watch out for the phishing attacks. People will say, oh, I placed an order and I didn't get my order, and blah blah blah. You got to make sure you're just not diligent. You're not like just giving people credit card information over the phone, or right, collecting, getting, you know, somebody might say, oh, I couldn't process my card through your website. And they call up and they go, oh, can you take my card over the phone? And then you, you know, you're taking a scam credit card and they're giving you bad address and all that. You got to really, really, really be careful because we've had a few incidents already since the beginning of the month. People have been smart enough to call us on the phone. I've even answered— I've answered the phone this morning at like 7:30. Some guy had a whole question for me. I was like, whoa, what's going on? It was like somebody was placing a big order last night on the website. They're like, what do we do? I was like, make a phone call, call the customer, see if he's legit, see if they're legit. If they're not legit, just process a refund. Too legit to quit because it already went through. Yep, 2 Live Crew. It's a birthday, it's a birthday. You got to remember, I grew up here. Yeah, man, I know.

Allen's very hip.

They're from Miami, you know, and Uncle Luke, man, shout out to Uncle Luke.

We should get you on the show. That would be amazing.

What, get Uncle Luke on the show?

That would be amazing. He would have so many stories to tell. Okay, payment processing in the music industry.

It's pretty interesting. I mean, there's definitely—

which company is doing that? Like, I would be— I'm I would really be interested in knowing, like, what company is— like, for instance, Def Jam, right, record label. How do they invoice the venues?

Well, they don't invoice the venues. That's all handled through, like, Ticketmaster and everything.

No, not all the time.

Not all the time. No.

Well, I mean, for— okay, so that's— so, like, Def Jam is probably a bad example because that's, you know, they got a Live Nation deal. Right. But like, for these— look, for independent artists, for instance, I wonder how they're— because a lot of times they're getting paid cash.

Yeah, they probably either get cash or there's wires, PayPal, a wire and PayPal, maybe. I doubt it for large transactions.

I got large transaction in my business PayPal account.

I guess if you— I guess if they're used to it, 5 figures, they just want to—

yeah, I'm just saying, someone's playing a venue, I don't know about 6-figure deals in PayPal, right?

That's what I'm saying. Somebody's paying somebody 6 figures, they're probably doing a wire transfer.

You would assume so, right? But then what's— so that, like, it gets to my question, like, because then the, the wire transfer, the bank that you send it from, they're taking— most of the time you get charged $35 most of the time. And then to get it, you get charged depending on where you bank.

Sometimes they don't— like, my bank doesn't charge me.

My, my bank used to— the other bank that I have charged you still charges you. Some banks, kind of ridiculous too.

Some banks charge $5 or $10, but in most cases they don't charge any money, right, to receive. The sender always pays.

I'm just saying, like, so like, I think it would be a— for the independent industry, it might be a good idea to get your own merchant account.

Yeah, well, that, you know, the thing is, is that like Now there's a lot of people, they, they make, you know, that are creators or bands and they want to sell their own merchandise. And you know, it's better to set up your own e-commerce shop.

Exactly. And set up an online store using WordPress, right?

Then get your merchant account from Nationwide Payment Systems, right?

And then install the, the WordPress plugin and we'll provide you the API key, right? It's all free, just like WooCommerce and PayPal, all the plugins are, except it's ours. And yeah, you get to hit the ground running.

Yeah, hit the ground running, sell your merch. Merch. Yeah, there's a lot of people trying to set up like websites because they're creators and— or they're trying to sell like their own little items and all that. You just have to make sure, like during the holidays too, like if you run out of something, you know, on your website, let's, you know, and you don't have inventory control on there, like, oh, we have 50 of these, 20 of those. If you don't have that, I feel sorry if you don't, but right, if you don't have that, you run out of an item and then you can't get it, you need to reach out to the customers. You need to tell them, hey, you're going to get a refund. You need to be very careful because Somebody pays for something, they're expecting it to get shipped.

Yeah, especially this time of year, you don't want that type of problem, right?

I like it when I buy something and then I'll get an email, you know, and I usually check my spam because I got tons of spam, but I like it when I get an email, the tracking numbers in there, or like even if it's just like, thank you for your purchase, right, because of the holidays, you know, expect a little bit more time in the delivery time communication.

And that's The technology—

communication is key, right?

And technology is set up to whereas you don't have to do much but like fill in the data, right? And then click.

Yeah, there's so many plugins that you can put into your website so that you can have like, you know, the shipping and all that, and a way for somebody to log in and then go look up their order.

Yeah, I mean, because I mean, WooCommerce gives you the basics and it redirects you to a thank you page, and then You know, it's just you doing your, you know, you know, your due diligence. If you're doing— if you're a DIYer, you know what I mean, right? Or if you have the money, pay someone like myself and I'll get you hooked up. But it's not that hard. It's not that hard. Yeah, we always watch a couple YouTube videos. Yeah, that's all I got to learn. I didn't go to school for this.

So keep your eye out for fraud at your business. We've done a couple of other ones about fraud. We can but mention the episode, the last couple of episodes that we talked about in the show notes.

And, you know, we'll post them in the comments. We can't post them in the show notes because when you share the show, you can only have one link.

Oh, well, we don't have to put a link. We can just say which episode it is, I guess. But whatever, we'll figure it out. But you can always look through all the podcasts and see which ones were about fraud.

Yeah, b2bvault.info has the, the latest, I think the 15 to 20 most latest episodes. Yeah, that you can listen to.

But it's important because we don't want to see our clients getting ripped off. We don't want to hear about businesses getting ripped off. I want everybody to have a safe and happy holiday season, you know. And it's— and also, one, a couple things to keep in mind is, is that the Christmas holiday is on the weekend, New Year's is on the weekend. So the Mondays following those holidays, the banks are closed.

So you're not going to get a merchant deposit until at least Tuesday or Wednesday.

Yeah. And I always have a few customers, 'Oh, where's my money?' 'The bank's closed.' 'Oh, okay.' So that's just something to keep an eye on. And, and a lot of the fraud always occurs at the that, you know, they're, they're gonna go— a fraudster, they're gonna go on your website like at night. Yeah, late, like after 10, 11 o'clock at night, in the middle of the night, or early, early in the morning. And even like, I've even told some people, like, I don't know if they have the ability to do it because, you know, they're DIY the website, but if they have a website person, they, they sometimes can see like the IP address where the order came from. And if you see an IP address that's masked or an IP address from another country and they're getting something delivered, turn that down. Yeah, those are usually going to be fraud. Yeah, it's better to return the money, be safe. You know, I always say the method is like call the per— check out the order, call the person on the phone, check the address. If they don't answer the phone and you look at the address and it's going to, you UPS, an office suite, some kind of unknown address, and, you know, and all that, that's when you gotta—

and listen, yeah, I was just— before you even go into it further, I, I think, you know, because I know it's difficult to do this.

Yeah, it is different.

It's very hard to monitor your sales.

Yeah, but you shouldn't have—

but you got to, right?

You have to do it. I don't care how hard it is.

Like you have to do that, right? Like, because it— otherwise, because how much is it per chargeback usually that you have to pay?

$25 or $30.

So on top of the money that you're sending back to the, to the consumer—

well, if you lost— if you got a chargeback and let's say it was $100, you still get a $25 fee.

So you're losing the $100 sale that was— and you lost your goods and services, and you lost your goods Or you got hit with a fee, and you got hit with a fee, right? So that's a, that's a pretty gangster trifecta, man. I would not want that to be happening.

No, you just have to, you just have to be careful and identify the ones that are, that could be bad. And it might be 2 or 3 in a day, and, and they hit new— a lot of people hit new businesses, right?

I didn't even think of that. Imagine, so it's $25 per, right? So like, just a minute, so you get 4 of them one day, that's $100. You know, that's probably more than one of your products on the website.

We also get fraud here because we get people that come onto our website, they want to get approved for a merchant account, right? And then we go look at their information, the information is bunk. So one of the questions, like on the 10-question thing on our website, yeah, ask for a cell phone number. So people will put in like a Google number or one of those voice to text things. Well, that won't validate, so they get declined right away. Or they put in an email address, and we— the, the software we use checks like the age of that email. Yeah, checks the age of it. So if you do— if that fraudster just created some Gmail account, and plus we're not going to believe it if we see a website called Justin's Air Conditioning Company right? And then the email is some, you know, justin@gmail.com. Well, why does he— has a website, why doesn't he have a domain email address, right? Right. And then the phone number he gives doesn't match the website, you know.

So I mean, that's a pretty common thing though, right?

But I'm just saying, like, we've seen people that we don't give them a merchant account just off of that. Yeah, we— yeah, we'll decline it because we'll call up on the phone to the business.

I mean, but I'm saying you'll at least do your due diligence because I'd had a business before I had a business email for a long time, right?

No, no, we'll do our due diligence. But I'm saying like if you go to the website, you see they have info@justins—

oh, and then they got an email from justin@gmail.com, right? Yeah, that makes sense.

So that's not going to match up. But I'm just saying like we'll call the business and ask for Justin because the phone number doesn't match the business. But then we'll find out that this per— this person, this fraudster right? We won't give them an account. But then we'll get a call back from the owner of the business and they're going, oh, I'm getting letters in the mail from credit card processing companies. And I don't know why other credit card companies are approving these people, but they are. Yeah. And then they run scam transactions and then they try to go after the real business owner, right?

That's terrible.

Yeah. And it's, and it's horrible. I've had 2 or 3 of them this year where One of them, the FBI called me.

I was here for that. That was fun.

They wanted to know how I figured it out. I was like, are you serious? Like, it was pretty blatant. Exactly what I explained to you. But you got to watch out, you know, because we're, you know, I feel like I'm on the front lines to stop fraud. You know, we're trying, we're on the front line of stopping fraud. We're helping merchants fight chargebacks. We're not getting, we're not letting fraudsters get a merchant account, right? You know, sometimes they apply but they get declined because the system says—

I hate— because, you know, a lot of the leads that come through the website are all fake.

Yeah, it's fake people.

It's terrible.

And, and they get— they're stupid because what do they think, we're not going to check the phone number? Um, yeah, no, the phone number, that's the first thing we do is look at the phone number and the website.

Name, address, phone, man. It's pretty simple. Like if it don't match up and you're trying to get a merchant account, like, you boo-boo the fool, man. I don't know what's—

yeah, and it's kind of— I, I feel, you know, I feel bad for the business owner because basically somebody—

and one guy has gotten hit with all the credit.

Yeah, one guy had like $50,000 of chargebacks. They were coming after him like 5 or 6 different companies. The FBI was involved, the local police was involved. The guys— the guy told me, he said he felt horrible that he cursed me out and he didn't listen to me when I told him to block his credit. I go, this person has your driver's license number.

Yeah, because I remember that because I was kind of geeked up because it was a big company, big company, and I was like, dude, this is gonna be a good account. Yeah, I have— it was like a, like an air conditioning manufacturing company that did parts.

Yeah, they did parts.

Couple of locations, huge manufacturing.

The guy didn't believe me, and bam, he called me back a few weeks later. He's like, oh, you got to help me, because I, I apologize, I should have listened to you when you told me I should check my credit.

There was actually two of them in the same year that you've done that too.

Yeah, well, there was that guy, and there was one from a— it was a one from another, like an air conditioning company. We had—

was it a plumbing company?

A plumbing company. Yeah. Yeah, it was air conditioning and plumbing. Yeah, but it was crazy that, that, you know, some people I tell them, I go, listen, somebody— because what they'll do is they'll make up a different— they'll have a real social for some other person, but they have your federal tax ID number. And somehow some company just goes, oh yeah, whatever, let's give them a merchant account. Then the person gets a virtual terminal or a terminal, keys in a bunch of credit cards, the money gets funded. Then all of a sudden chargebacks come in, then the bank's going calling that the fraudster, and the fraudster obviously is gone.

Doesn't exist anyway.

Doesn't exist. Was a fake Google phone number or whatever, and then they're gone. Then what do they do?

They're like, they're doing it again, like literally. There's no—

but then they go contact the actual business, they start sending them letters and calling up on the phone, and then the next thing you know, the business, what do they got to do? Get a lawyer. Call the cops, get their credit blocked, you know. And then, and then, you know, their lawyer is going to have to— or they're going to have to convince them that they had nothing to do with these fake transactions, right?

It's a mess.

It's a mess. Identity theft is horrible. Monitor— I tell everybody, you own a business, monitor your identity. You know, everybody's information is on the dark web, so that doesn't even shake me up when I get notices for that. Oh, your info's on the dark web. Okay, great, take it. We can do whatever. But you know, you got to monitor your credit report, um, at least once a month minimum. You know, have it set up where if anything happens, you get alerts. Monitor your credit report, you know, and your business credit too. You know, monitor. You don't want anything to happen like We've had it happen where somebody wrote to the BBB. Wasn't even us, wasn't even our company, wasn't even— the name was slightly similar. You don't want, you know, you don't want to just go, oh well, I got this letter from BBB, that's not me, I have nothing to do with it, and throw it out. You gotta follow, you gotta follow out the same thing. Like, people leave, you know, look, they, they don't look at their statements. You were saying, yeah, they don't look at their merchant statement.

I get upset when you start telling stories about that because I wasn't super successful as a businessman, but I took it very seriously, right? Like, oh, we recently— I mean, I gotta stop saying I wasn't successful. I was successful. I had a business for 10 years. I was able to support my family off that. That's very successful.

Yeah, that's successful.

I just didn't make a million dollars. Oh well.

But the thing is, is like, we recently got a customer, right? So they sent us their statements. When they sent the statements, I was like, Are you kidding me? The, the all the pricing was different on all 4 statements. The merchant didn't know anything about it. And then we had another one recently.

When I look at him when he's saying that, I'm just like, what?

I'm like, and then, and then I had another one the other day, which that one I'm sure the person's not going to talk to me ever. They're not returning my phone call because I think they were embarrassed. They shouldn't be embarrassed because they don't know anything about merchant services. So the guy goes, oh, we pay 2.9%. Now he didn't send me the merchant statement, he did a screen share, but I can see it on the screen, right? So I go, yeah, there's the 2.9%. Then I say, oh, scroll down. And I said, oh, you paid all this, and, and you paid this and that. And I said, then you add— we just did a podcast, how much do you pay for merchant service? I said, you add all of that up. And the guy's trying to tell me, no, no, no. I'm like, Yes, yes, yes. All that came out of your bank account because you could see, because they had them on daily discount, then there was extra fees. So I said, add all that up, divide by your sales, and the number was almost 6%. They thought they paid 2.9%. They had no clue they were paying 6%. And we're going to release a worksheet soon so people can see that. And then we were talking about another article that came out today.

I might just build the out on the site. I don't know, I'm gonna see how they put it on.

Maybe we should put it on, um, put it on B2B Vault site. I don't know.

I don't know. No, because it's not for B2B Vault, it's for Nationwide Payments.

Well, we want people to download it, put it on both of them. I don't care. No, I'm saying we'll make a PDF.

I'm talking about like just the, like a calculator.

Oh, the calculator. Okay, if you can—

I mean, that's not a I don't know.

No, but the worksheet, the worksheet is a little bit more because the worksheet's gonna ask you to fill in like your junk fees.

It's gonna make you— you're gonna really learn something, right?

You're gonna learn something because the worksheet's gonna ask you to fill in like your junk fees that you have on your set, on your page, so you can see how many of these monthly fees that you have that are being charged by the credit card processor. Um, we tried not to part— we haven't You know, we try not to partner with companies who are going to junk up people's statements. And that's the other thing, you know. And then, and one other thing we'll just touch on briefly is, is that there's a lot of new, new, new services that are out there that have just become available for merchants. And we're going to be doing our podcast. It'll be interesting because I want to go back and look at the podcast we did last year, The Future of Credit Card Processing. And see how many things that I talked about actually—

there's two parts, right? Got a lot of listening to do, right?

Well, we can look at the list of what, what things came, came, uh, true out of that. Because, well, we did one about the future of credit card machines, and I can tell you that looking at the roadmap of what's coming out, there's a lot of really cool stuff. I think we're— that's actually gonna come out in 2023 that's gonna be really, really, really outstanding to help merchants. Game changers. Small game changers for small businesses. That, that I'm gonna tell you, small businesses and mobile businesses really need some help to make things more affordable.

GoDaddy launches their mobile.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

I can't wait to see that.

Yeah.

There's something waiting on that. I mean, that's something. Well, there's two things anyone can go out.

There's a new mobile app, and then a new mobile app so you can take payments, and then a new— and then another mobile app, a second one, right? A second one that's going to be added to that one where people— you're— where you could open up the app and then someone can tap their card or use their phone and make a payment. You don't need any more equipment. It's going to work on Android and Apple. So that's going to be really exciting. But we'll talk about that more detail, you know, on the, on the, on the Future of Credit Card Processing podcast. So watch out for that episode. Well, I think for small businesses and sole proprietors, it's, you know, someone, a one-person business. Yeah, it's going to be very popular. And there's a lot of one-person businesses right now.

I can think of a couple.

No, no. In this economy. That we're in, a lot of people are starting their own business, and that I think could come in very handy. Oh, absolutely, for those businesses.

Yeah, it's exciting about all the shady ways and things that are going to happen with that.

No, but there's also some other stuff coming out with paying with a QR code and a lot of other really cool stuff that's coming out.

No, I'm, I'm talking about the device from GoDaddy though. Is that coming?

Yeah, that's coming. The device is coming very soon. All right, so everyone, peace out.

Just— I said the device by GoDaddy, and that's all you're getting.

Yeah, new device. So everybody, peace out. Carpe diem. Happy holidays. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Christmas. Merry Christmas. Watch Die Hard.

Happy Kwanzaa.

Happy Kwanzaa. Happy every whatever. If we left out any holidays, happy holidays. And even the Hanukkah gnomes.

Peace.

Your mom didn't come visit.